Google Search Results Have Liberal Bias, Study Finds (thedenverchannel.com)

According to a new study reported by The Wall Street Journal, Google's search results tend to lean liberal. "An analysis by online-search marketer CanIRank.com found that 50 recent searches for political terms on Google surfaced more liberal-leaning webpages than conservative ones, as rated by a panel of four people." The Denver Channel reports: "Minimum wage" tended to yield more liberal results, while "does gun control reduce crime" resulted in more conservative ones. Searches for "financial regulation" and "federal reserve" found mostly nonpartisan links. CanIRank used the opinions of four people to determine how liberal or conservative each website was. For 16 percent of the political search terms studied, no right-leaning results showed up at all on the first page of results. CanIRank noted this could be a problem for democracy. A different study found most people click on one of the first five search results. Users rarely move on to the second page. A Google spokesperson said in an email to the WSJ: "From the beginning, our approach to search has been to provide the most relevant answers and results to our users, and it would undermine people's trust in our results, and our company, if we were to change course." According to Google, their results are "determined by algorithms using hundreds of factors" and "reflect the content and information that is available on the internet."

Comments

Can you see Google's Code?

[s.petry]

I tested the theory several times through the election process. "How do I vote" would immediately fill in "for Hillary Clinton" and the name "Donald Trump" would not appear even when you typed in "Donald Trum". Searching for "Presidential Candidates" would show Hillary and Obama, with Trump being down between 6 and 9 places in the list. When millions of people report the same exact symptom, it no longer remains something you can explain with a personal anecdote.

Google Management and executives have a bias toward Democratic/Liberal politics. This can show up in their product with relative ease, and if you don't believe so perhaps spend a bit of time with data analysts who can show you how to manipulate data for the effect you want. Study Statistics, which is all about manipulating data for effect.

While it's true that the study will be accepted by people who have the world view that Google censors content, people who happen to favor Democratic/Liberal politics will disbelieve it.

Reality is not distorted, only our view of it is distorted. Without facts, such as the question in my subject, we can only speculate on the facts that we do have.